The Rise of Eastern Europe

December 1, 2002

by Bruce Walker

As several commentators have noted, there is a clear difference in how
safe, free, old democracies like France, Germany, Holland, and Denmark
view our war against the radical Islamic world terrorism and how the new
democracies of Eastern Europe view our struggle.

Where have the people been grateful for the role America has played in
championing decency and humanity against this brutal terrorism? Not in
Western Europe. Those whose safety and prosperity we protected for fifty
years, the affluent populations of these old nations once marched in the
streets to protest President Reagan’s successful campaign to free them
from the threat of Soviet imperialism, view us as perennial upstarts.

Japan, once the rising sun of the global economy, now has textbooks are
rewritten to exclude inconvenient historical facts like the Rape of Nanking,
the Bataan Death March, and the attack on Pearl Harbor. Steeped in a lingering
economic depression and dreams of a nationalist theology dispelled, the
third largest economy on Earth seems hopelessly selfish.

Latin America, whose nations owe their independence from European powers
by the will of a new American republic, has spent most of its time over
the fifty years complaining about our creativity and our civil society,
as if invention and tolerance were part of some Marxist delusional “zero
sum” game. These peoples have not decided if Castro is a good or a bad
man.

The citizens with whom we share the longest unguarded border in the world
seem also too eager to pounce upon a nation that has ever defended it
from threats. Not even Canada - or at least the smug, socialist slugs
who run Canada - appreciates its friendly giant to the south.

So who appreciates us? As soon as we free them from the apostle of Stalin
who reigns in Baghdad, the Iraqi people will appreciate us. Right now
the people of Iran, who twenty years ago called us the “Great Satan” understand
our goodness. These peoples, however, are still slaves of wicked rulers.

There is a place where we are loved. Those unhappy people who lived under
the Sultans, the Tsars, the Nazis, the Soviets, and so many other monsters
of modern history - they know and love America. The stretch of sad lands,
whose inhabitants were the rugs on which Vikings, Visigoths, Mongols,
Hapsburgs, Hollenzollerns, Hitler and Stalin stamped their boots understand
the blessing of America.

Perhaps it is not coincidence that after the initial influx of immigrants
into the new American nations - the Irish and the Germans - that most
of the immigrants who followed came from Poland, from the Russian Pale
of Jewish imprisonment, from poor Russia herself under the lash, from
Hungary, from Ukraine, from Lithuania and the other nations whose history
more resembled the maps of war games than of peoples.

These peoples did not speak the Germanic and the Romantic languages of
which English is a confluence of words and of grammar. The Jewish immigrants
were not the sophisticates of German Reform Judaism, but rather the wretchedly
poor Jews of the Shetl. The Christian immigrants might have come parts
of a Turkish empire in which they were Dhimmi, and whose holocausts grimly
preceded the horrors of Auschwitz.

All those people who were these Poles, Eastern European
Jews, Czechs, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Serbs, Croats the helpless subjects
of Nazi murder and Communist slavery view America differently than other
people. Their spirit was kept alive by the Yanks landing at D-Day (they
harbored no illusions of what the Red Army meant as “liberators”) and
by Radio Free Europe.

Those in Eastern Europe who have suffered for Christ or who have suffered
for being Jewish understand good and bad. Where these people have lived,
moral relativism is a luxury and knowledge of the immortal soul that God
has given each of us is the only sure comfort in an uncertain life.

The peoples of these lands have often been mocked by the richer nations
of Western Europe. The faith of the Hassidim and the Orthodox Christian
was superstition to the sophisticated freethinkers of richer societies.
Science, wealth and technology would solve all the problems of existence,
according to the materialists of the West, whose roots were in the Enlightenment.
This is something that the pious Christians and devout Jews of Eastern
Europe never accepted.

Eastern Europe will rise into greatness, just as the hard heartland of
America - Flyover Country, to our indigenous snobs - has risen into greatness.
Savvy pundits are wrong; conventional wisdom is bunk. Those who treasure
their blessings will multiply those blessings. That is what happened in
America, and it is what will happen in the lands of Eastern Europe. Against
all predictions, it is Eastern Europe that will join with America in doing
good in the world.

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Bruce Walker has been a dyed in the wool conservative since, as
a sixth grader, he campaigned door to door for Barry Goldwater. Bruce has had
almost two hundred published articles have appeared in the Oklahoma Bar Journal,
Law & Order, Legal Secretary Today, The Single Parent, Enter Stage Right,
Citizen's View, The American Partisan, Port of Call, and several other professional
and political periodicals.